THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 18, 1996 TAG: 9602160724
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
PIECEWORK
PETE HAMILL
Little, Brown. 432 pp. $24.95.
Two years ago, Pete Hamill's memoir, A Drinking Life, led us through the neighborhoods, kitchens and barrooms of his Brooklyn boyhood, reconstructing the pressures and influences that created one of the strongest voices of contemporary American journalism.
His latest book, Piecework, is a compilation of much of his best newspaper and magazine work over the past 25 years. It is a tour through the most frightening and fascinating decades of our lifetime, by a guide who has been in the front of the bus all the way and never blinked, even when things got ugly out there.
Hamill is one of journalism's endangered species, a passionate humanist who can write with strength and conviction on limitless topics. He remains a liberal champion of any underdog who has the heart to keep fighting, but he has always had a streak of immigrant-son pragmatism. He may be on the left, but his knees do not jerk.
This shows up most forcefully in his pieces on race, drugs and immigration. Though a lifelong campaigner against bigotry, a simple headline from ``The New Race Hustle'' (Esquire, 1990) proves he will not shy from the hypocrisy of blacks attacking the ``racism'' of Korean grocers in Brooklyn while vilifying the Koreans as ``yellow monkeys.''
In ``A Confederacy of Complainers'' (Esquire, 1991), he attacks the American cult of victimization: ``. . . victimism has one overriding slogan, the response to almost all questions about the source of their misery and victimhood: It's not my fault! Dropped out of high school? Not my fault. Started shooting heroin or smoking crack when others passed up both? Not my fault. Married the wrong people, got caught robbing stores, crashed the car with a load on? Not me, man, not my fault. Victimism implies that nobody is personally responsible for the living of a life.''
It is a sad footnote that nearly all of Hamill's ruminations on the dark edges of society are as fresh as tomorrow's headlines, even though some of them were written more than a decade ago. His pain in wrestling with their meaning is evident.
Other pieces haven't held up as well. Reading some of them is like opening a desk drawer and finding a ticket stub to a play you'd forgotten attending.
Hamill's on-scene reports from the war zones of Nicaragua and Lebanon, especially, seem musty, having been surpassed by the fresher horrors of Bosnia and Rwanda. A short take on Daniel Ortega's spartan life as a Nicaraguan revolutionary loses some luster when you recall that Ortega has since lost the revolution, and an election, and joined the government of his erstwhile enemies. Interviews with refugees in yesterday's Beirut read depressingly like the pleadings of the dispossessed in today's Bosnia.
Hamill is at his best where his true passions lie: with people, especially those who have made an impact, either on Pete Hamill or society at large; and with the places that have been important to his life, most notably New York City and anywhere in Mexico.
His appreciation of the late Cus D'Amato, the fight trainer who made champions of Floyd Patterson, Jose Torres, Mike Tyson and many in between, has an eloquence worthy of the passing of a head of state.
Another gem is a moody telling of early-morning hours spent cruising Manhattan streets in Frank Sinatra's limousine, simply because the great man was lonely and felt like talking.
And Hamill captures what most critics have missed about Madonna's hedonism: ``What saves this performance from preposterous narcissism is a simple corrective: There's a wink in the act. While Madonna presents her latest illusion, a hint of a smile tells us that we shouldn't take any of it too seriously.''
It's easy to see what Hamill himself might have learned from something D'Amato once told him, speaking, ostensibly, about fighters: ``A lot of guys have the mechanics and no heart; lots of guys have heart, no mechanics; the thing that puts it together, it's mysterious, it's like making a work of art, you bring everything to it, you make it up when you're doing it.''
Pete Hamill brings everything to it, but he hasn't had to make it up while he was doing it. It all happened right there in front of his eyes. MEMO: David Addis is a staff writer. by CNB